Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI
Sam Altman
Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. He previously served as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator.
About Sam Altman
Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research and deployment company whose products include ChatGPT and DALL·E. He helped establish OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory.
Before focusing on OpenAI, Altman served as president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. His public work includes discussions of AI deployment, governance, safety, and the economic effects of increasingly capable AI systems.
Mentioned in our coverage
228 articles name Sam Altman, excluding author credits.
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- Pacing the Frontier: 1,178 AI Employees Ask US to Build Slowdown Tools →
Not a pause petition — a request for the option to buy time. Staff across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Thinking Machines published Pacing the Frontier; Anthropic’s company account backed it with its RSI research.
- Sam Altman’s ChatGPT Work Trip Demo — Is Personal AI Here? →
Altman’s “it…just worked” trip prompt went viral. Garry Tan called it personal AI; replies asked about Ultra quotas and chat-history access. Here’s the workflow stack — and what normal users can recreate.
- AI Burnout Is Real — Focus and Followthrough →
AI promised less work and delivered more open loops. explainx.ai decodes Manelius’s Essentialism take, Garry Tan’s eclipse metaphor, and the HN thread on org YAAS and proof of understanding.
- Can AI Control a Drone Yet? Project Pilot Explained →
Project Pilot asks whether frontier models can locate-and-follow with a cheap office drone. Fable 5 clears four of five Drone-Bench tasks; Reconstruct is the missing piece — and the governance warning.
- ChatGPT Work Now Orchestrates Threads From Your Phone →
From a phone, Altman showed Work planning a trip, building a site, and drafting emails. explainx.ai covers cross-thread orchestration, sub-agents, and why “Work” undersells the product.
- Grok 4.6 and 4.7: Musk's Announced Timeline, Explained →
Musk announced Grok 4.6 and Grok 4.7 on X on July 25, 2026, days after Claude Opus 5 shipped. Here's the timeline, the Pareto-frontier claim behind it, and what Grok 4.5's actual benchmarks show while we wait for either model.